This article considers the implications of two central constructs of sociocultural theory (SCT) for second language (L2) development: mediation and internalization. It first discusses Vygotsky's general theoretical claim that human mental activity arises as a consequence of the functional system formed by our biologically specified mental capacities and our culturally constructed symbolic artifacts. It then examines some of the L2 research that has investigated the extent to which L2 users are able to deploy their new language for cognitive mediation. Specific attention is given to the mediational function of L2 private speech and to the synchronization of gestures and speech from the perspective of Slobin's thinking for speaking framework, a framework that interfaces quite well with Vygotsky's theory. The second general topic addressed, internalization, is intimately connected to the first. It is argued that internalization of the features of a L2 takes place through imitation, especially as occurs in private speech. Imitation, based on recent neuroscience and child development research, is seen as an intentional and potentially transformative process rather than as rote mimicking. The research documents that L2 children and adults rely on imitation in their private speech when they encounter new linguistic affordances. What remains to be established is the connection between the linguistic features of private speech and those deployed by L2 speakers in their social performance. Finally, the article proposes that the study of how L2 learners internalize and develop the capacity to use conceptual and associated linguistic knowledge should move to the forefront of SCT L2 research and argues that a productive way of realizing this agenda is through the union of SCT and cognitive linguistics.

This article reports on a study that investigated the effect of different amounts of planning time on the speech performance of L2 speakers. Subjects were 4 groups of learners of German (31 in total) performing 2 tasks each. The tasks varied in the degree of structure they contained and the familiarity of information they tapped. The control group had no planning time available; the 3 experimental groups had 1, 5, and 10 minutes of planning time, respectively, before they started speaking. Results show fluency and lexical density of speech increase as a function of planning time. Accuracy of speech improved with only 1 minute planning but did not increase with more planning time. Complexity of speech was significantly higher for the 10-minute planning condition only. No significant differences were found for the effect of planning on the different tasks. This study employed various general and specific constructs for measuring fluency, complexity, and accuracy of speech. The interrelationships and qualities of these measures are also investigated and discussed.

Unlike other areas of second language study, which are primarily concerned with acquisitional patterns of interlanguage knowledge over time, most studies in interlanguage pragmatics have focused on second language use rather than second language learning. The aim of this paper is to profile interlanguage pragmatics as an area of inquiry in second language acquisition research, by reviewing existing studies with a focus on learning, examining research findings in interlanguage pragmatics that shed light on some basic questions in SLA, exploring cognitive and social-psychological theories that might offer explanations of different aspects of pragmatic development, and proposing a research agenda for the study of interlanguage pragmatics with a developmental perspective that will tie it more closely to other areas of SLA.

This article is broadly concerned with the differences between individual language learners. In terms of particular content areas of Individual Differences (ID) research, it surveys developments in foreign language aptitude, motivation, learner strategies, and learner styles. A brief review of earlier research on aptitude is presented, followed by discussions of more contemporary work on the origin of aptitude, namely, as a residue of first language learning ability, and on the existence of evidence for “learner types.” Motivation research is reviewed partly with regard to Robert Gardner's research, and then in terms of a wider framework for the functioning of motivation within an educational context. The review of learner strategies research emphasizes current attempts to develop taxonomies of such strategies, and to investigate their theoretical basis and their trainability. Finally, learner styles research, drawing on field independence theory, is discussed, and links are made with the research on aptitude. The article finishes with sections on conceptual and methodological issues in ID research.

This study explores whether pragmatic fluency can best be acquired in the classroom by provision of input and opportunity for communicative practice alone, or whether learners profit more when additional explicit instruction in the use of conversational routines is provided. It is hypothesized that such instruction raises learners' awareness of the functions and contextual distributions of routines, enabling them to become more pragmatically fluent.

Two versions of a communication course taught to advanced German learners of English for 14 weeks are examined, one version providing explicit metapragmatic information, the other withholding it. Samples of tape-recorded conversations at various stages of the courses are used to assess how students' pragmatic fluency developed and whether and how the development of fluency benefits from metapragmatic awareness.

The major purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of integrative motivation and instrumental motivation on the learning of French/English vocabulary. Integrative motivation was defined in terms of a median split on scores obtained on subtests from the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery, while instrumental motivation was situationally determined in terms of monetary reward for doing well. The results demonstrated that both integrative motivation and instrumental motivation facilitated learning. Other results indicated that instrumentally motivated students studied longer than noninstrumentally motivated students when there was an opportunity to profit from learning, but this distinction disappeared when the incentive was removed. Both integratively and instrumentally motivated students spent more time thinking about the correct answer than those not so motivated, suggesting that both elements have an energizing effect. A secondary purpose of this study was to assess the consequences of computer administration of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery. In this respect the results were most encouraging. Computer administration appeared not to detract from the internal consistency reliability of the subscales used, and moreover there was an indication that an index of reaction time to individual items might provide a way of identifying social desirability responding

It has been suggested that tense and aspect distributions are very difficult to learn in a second language (L2), they are prone to fossilize universally, and their interpretive properties are subject to a critical period (Coppieters, 1987). This study focuses on the acquisition of the semantic implications of the preterite-imperfect contrast in Spanish by English-speaking individuals of very advanced proficiency in Spanish who were not living in a Spanish-speaking country. By assuming that aspect is encoded in a functional category where the features [+/-perfective] are checked, depending on the language (Giorgi & Pianesi, 1997), this study asks whether ultimate attainment in the aspectual domain is possible and whether features of functional categories not selected in early childhood are subject to a critical period, as Hawkins and Chan's (1997) Failed Formal Features Hypothesis states. Experimental evidence from two tasks probing the interpretations of perfective and imperfective aspectual forms in Spanish suggests that many learners (almost 30%) in our total subject pool (including advanced to near-native speakers) and 70% of the near-native group performed like native speakers on all sentence types in all tasks. Although aspect is certainly a difficult area to master, particularly because the meanings of the imperfect are acquired quite late, L2 learners are clearly able to overcome the parametric options of their native language. At least for this domain, it is suggested that access to Universal Grammar does not necessarily decay with age in L2 acquisition.

Previous research on the impact of pretask planning on interlanguage development (e.g., Crookes, 1989; Ellis, 1987; Foster & Skehan, 1996) has focused solely on the linguistic quality of planned output, leaving the cognitive and attentional processes engaged during planning time unexplored. Drawing on recent research on focus on form (Doughty & Williams, 1998a) and on retrospective methodologies used in strategy use research (e.g., O'Malley & Chamot, 1990), the study reported here investigated whether planning opportunity results in an increased focus on form at the level of strategic attention to form during planning time, as well as at the level of production outcomes during task performance. The results provide support for the claim that planning before doing an L2 task can promote an increased focus on form by providing space for the learner to devote conscious attention during pretask planning to formal and systemic aspects of the language needed to accomplish a particular task.

Research has begun to demonstrate that L2 words can be learned incidentally through watching audio-visual materials. Although there are a large number of studies that have investigated incidental vocabulary learning through reading a single text, there are no studies that have explored incidental vocabulary learning through viewing a single full-length TV program. The present study fills this gap. Additionally, three word-related variables (frequency of occurrence, cognateness, word relevance) and one learner-related variable (prior vocabulary knowledge) that might contribute to incidental vocabulary learning were examined. Two experiments were conducted with Dutch-speaking EFL learners to measure the effects of viewing TV on form recognition and meaning recall (Experiment 1) and meaning recognition (Experiment 2). The findings showed that viewing TV resulted in incidental vocabulary learning at the level of meaning recall and meaning recognition. The research also revealed that learning was affected by frequency of occurrence, prior vocabulary knowledge, and cognateness.

Psychologically speaking, all linguistic behavior is the overt manifestation of some type of underlying knowledge that is represented in the mind/brain of an individual. Exposure to linguistic data is necessary for growth of the system of knowledge. On the basis of only overt linguistic behavior, how can we ascertain whether the native and nonnative knowledge systems that people have are of distinct or similar types? Is there a (necessary) relationship between type of knowledge and type of linguistic exposure?

The hypothesis to be defended is that negative data and explicit data result in a type of knowledge that is not to be equated with linguistic competence. The claim is not that negative and explicit data cannot give rise to knowledge; rather, the specific claim is that only positive data can effect the construction of an interlanguage grammar that is comparable to the knowledge system that characterizes the result of first language acquisition.

Fluency in a second language is considered important by both learners and teachers but is not well understood. This paper describes what is known about second language fluency and describes a number of psychological learning mechanisms that might explain how fluency develops. These include the mechanisms underlying the contrast between automatic and controlled processing, the learning mechanisms postulated within Anderson's ACT* theory of cognition, Bialystok's conception of the control dimension of language development, the notion of restructuring, recent proposals for the redefinition of automaticity as retrieval from memory (both instance and strength versions), and chunking theories. The paper concludes with some suggestions for research into the development of second language fluency itself that can fill gaps in existing knowledge and reduce our dependence on other fields for explanatory principles, while contributing simultaneously to discussion of the mechanisms responsible for skill development in general.

Having focused previously on attention, cognitively oriented investigations of interlanguage variation and development are turning toward other possible explanatory variables, such as planning. The present study reports on an experiment in which two groups of 20 Japanese learners of English as a second language performed two monologic production tasks with and without time for planning. It was found that providing learners with time to plan their utterances results in interlanguage productions which are more complex in the short run.

Comprehensibility, a major concept in second language (L2) pronunciation research that denotes listeners’ perceptions of how easily they understand L2 speech, is central to interlocutors’ communicative success in real-world contexts. Although comprehensibility has been modeled in several L2 oral proficiency scales—for example, the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or the International English Language Testing System (IELTS)—shortcomings of existing scales (e.g., vague descriptors) reflect limited empirical evidence as to which linguistic aspects influence listeners’ judgments of L2 comprehensibility at different ability levels. To address this gap, a mixed-methods approach was used in the present study to gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic aspects underlying listeners’ L2 comprehensibility ratings. First, speech samples of 40 native French learners of English were analyzed using 19 quantitative speech measures, including segmental, suprasegmental, fluency, lexical, grammatical, and discourse-level variables. These measures were then correlated with 60 native English listeners’ scalar judgments of the speakers’ comprehensibility. Next, three English as a second language (ESL) teachers provided introspective reports on the linguistic aspects of speech that they attended to when judging L2 comprehensibility. Following data triangulation, five speech measures were identified that clearly distinguished between L2 learners at different comprehensibility levels. Lexical richness and fluency measures differentiated between low-level learners; grammatical and discourse-level measures differentiated between high-level learners; and word stress errors discriminated between learners of all levels.

This paper reports on two studies that addressed the issue of ultimate attainment by late second language learners. The aim of the studies, which included a carefully screened group of highly successful Dutch learners of English in their designs, was to determine whether or not late second language learners who had achieved a nativelike performance in the pronunciation of a second language could be identified. Speech samples provided by two groups of learners, one of which consisted of highly successful learners only, and a native speaker control group were rated for accent by native speakers of English. The ratings obtained by some learners were within the range of the ratings assigned to the native speaker controls. Such results suggest that it is not impossible to achieve an authentic, nativelike pronunciation of a second language after a specified biological period of time. Examination of the learning histories of the highly successful learners lead the authors to argue that certain learner characteristics and learning contexts may work together to override the disadvantages of a late start.

This eye-tracking study tests the hypothesis that more attention leads to more learning, following claims that attention to new language elements in the input results in their initial representation in long-term memory (i.e., intake; Robinson, 2003; Schmidt, 1990, 2001).

Twenty-eight advanced learners of English read English texts that contained 12 targets for incidental word learning. The target was a known word (control condition), a matched pseudoword, or that pseudoword preceded or followed by the known word (with the latter being a cue to the pseudoword’s meaning). Participants’ eye-fixation durations on the targets during reading served as a measure of the amount of attention paid (see Rayner, 2009).

Results indicate that participants spent more time processing the unknown pseudowords than their matched controls. The longer participants looked at a pseudoword during reading, the more likely they were to recognize that word in an unannounced vocabulary posttest. Finally, the known, appositive cues were fixated longer when they followed the pseudowords than when they preceded them; however, their presence did not lead to higher retention of the pseudowords.

We discuss how eye-tracking may add to existing methodologies for studying attention and noticing (Schmidt, 1990) in SLA.

To contribute to a better understanding of second language (L2) sentence processing, the present study examines how L2 learners parse temporarily ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses. Results are reported from both off-line and on-line experiments with three groups of advanced learners of Greek whose native languages (L1s) were Spanish, German, or Russian as well as from corresponding experiments with a control group of adult native speakers of Greek. We found that, despite their nativelike mastery of the construction under investigation, the L2 learners showed relative-clause attachment preferences that were different from those of the native speakers. Moreover, the L2 learners did not exhibit L1-based preferences in their L2 Greek, as might be expected if they were directly influenced by L1 attachment preferences. We suggest that L2 learners integrate information relevant for parsing differently from native speakers, with the L2 learners relying more on lexical cues than the native speakers and less on purely structurally based parsing strategies.

This paper offers an alternative interpretation for what has been called the defective tense hypothesis, the primacy of aspect hypothesis, or simply the aspect hypothesis in the literature on first and second language acquisition of tense and aspect. The aspect hypothesis states that first and second language learners will initially be influenced by the inherent semantic aspect of verbs or predicates in the acquisition of tense and aspect markers associated with or affixed to these verbs. Our account focuses on the observation that adult native speakers also appear to adhere to this primacy of inherent semantic aspect in the relative quantitative distribution of tense-aspect markers in their speech. We argue that a small set of cognitive operating principles and the notion of prototypicality account for this behavior in learners. Moreover, we argue that these principles are a consequence of how learners and native speakers alike organize information and their perspectives on it in ongoing discourse.

This study has aimed to investigate language learners’ emotional experiences through the lens of L2 future self-guides. To that end, the L2 motivational self system was chosen as the theoretical framework to relate learners’ emotions to their L2 selves. However, due to inconsistent results of past research concerning the motivational role of the ought-to L2 self, a revision of the model is proposed, discussed theoretically, and tested empirically. The results revealed a trichotomous model of L2 selves—ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self/own, and ought-to L2 self/others—with distinct motivational profiles. Furthermore, different types of L2 self-discrepancies were found to result in different emotional reactions on the part of L2 learners. Overall, the study provides a clearer picture of L2 learners’ emotions and their motivation in second language acquisition.

In a recent study, Lew-Williams and Fernald (2007) showed that native Spanish speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in Spanish articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. In this article, we report the results of a study investigating whether grammatical gender facilitates noun recognition during second language (L2) processing. Sixteen monolingual Spanish participants (control group) and 18 English-speaking learners of Spanish (evenly divided into high and low Spanish proficiency) saw two-picture visual scenes in which items matched or did not match in gender. Participants’ eye movements were recorded while they listened to 28 sentences in which masculine and feminine target items were preceded by an article that agreed in gender with the two pictures or agreed only with one of the pictures. An additional group of 15 Italian learners of Spanish was tested to examine whether the presence of gender in the first language (L1) modulates the degree to which gender is used during L2 processing. Data were analyzed by comparing the proportion of eye fixations on the objects in each condition. Monolingual Spanish speakers looked sooner at the referent on different-gender trials than on same-gender trials, replicating results reported in past literature. Italian-Spanish bilinguals exhibited a gender anticipatory effect, but only for the feminine condition. For the masculine condition, participants waited to hear the noun before identifying the referent. Like the Spanish monolinguals, the highly proficient English-Spanish speakers showed evidence of using gender information during online processing, whereas the less proficient learners did not. The results suggest that both proficiency in the L2 and similarities between the L1 and the L2 modulate the usefulness of morphosyntactic information during speech processing.

This study places the predictions of the bilingual interactive activation model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998) and the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) in the same context to investigate lexical processing in a second language (L2). The performances of two groups of native English speakers, one less proficient and the other more proficient in Spanish, were compared on translation recognition. In this task, participants decided whether two words, one in each language, are translation equivalents. The items in the critical conditions were not translation equivalents and therefore required a “no” response, but were similar to the correct translation in either form or meaning. For example, for translation equivalents such as cara-face, critical distracters included (a) a form-related neighbor to the first word of the pair (e.g., cara-card), (b) a form-related neighbor to the second word of the pair, the translation equivalent (cara-fact), or (c) a meaning-related word (cara-head). The results showed that all learners, regardless of proficiency, experienced interference for lexical neighbors and for meaning-related pairs. However, only the less proficient learners also showed effects of form relatedness via the translation equivalent. Moreover, all participants were sensitive to cues to grammatical class, such that lexical interference was reduced or eliminated when the two words of each pair were drawn from different grammatical classes. We consider the implications of these results for L2 lexical processing and for models of the bilingual lexicon.The writing of this article was supported in part by NSF Doctoral Enhancement Grant BCS-0111733 to Gretchen Sunderman and Judith F. Kroll, and by NSF grants BCS-0111734 and BCS-0418071 and NIH grant RO1MH62479 to Judith F. Kroll. We thank Maya Misra for advice on computing measures of orthographic similarity and Rachel Varra and Asha Persaud for research assistance. We also thank the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments.